Project 2000, Creating a Best Managed University, a strategy for organizational change designed to make Cornell a model for effective university administration and to enable the university to target its resources on academic excellence, has been announced by Cornell President Hunter Rawlings.

Rawlings said Project 2000 will be part of a larger effort to make Cornell's administrative processes more effective and efficient, and to attain financial equilibrium. By reconfiguring the way Cornell conducts its business, he said, Project 2000 will allow the university to concentrate more fully on its core mission of teaching, research and public service.

"Cornell recently has concluded a very successful capital campaign," Rawlings said. "Thanks to the support and generosity of so many of our alumni and friends, prospects for Cornell's long-term fiscal health are greatly improved. Now it is up to us to focus our priorities and our energies on those areas that need them most and are most critical to the fulfillment of our mission."

Since he assumed the presidency seven months ago, Rawlings has emphasized the need to develop a vision and strategy that would enable the university to excel in an era of constrained resources. Rawlings pointed to two key areas critical to that vision: setting academic priorities and focusing administrative efforts to support the core mission. He has asked Provost Don M. Randel to work closely with the deans to establish and reaffirm academic priorities, while Frederick A. Rogers, senior vice president and chief financial officer, works with deans and executive staff to reshape the university's administrative processes.

"Several initiatives already are under way in our review of academic programs," Randel said. "These initiatives will require a concurrent administrative effort that reforms administrative processes in order to better support our academic priorities."

"In the administrative areas, we will emphasize the improvement of processes and procedures that influence the administrative workload all across the campus," Rogers said. "The success of Project 2000 will allow more faculty and staff time as well as additional financial resources to be devoted to enhancing our education, research and service functions. By the year 2001, we hope to experience significant annual savings in administrative costs. We will do that by working together in partnership with colleges and units to ensure that every step in a process is efficient and adds value. New systems will be only one component of implementing these changes in the coming years." "A number of colleges, departments and central offices already have been rethinking or re-engineering the ways administrative work is done in their areas, eliminating unnecessary steps and duplication of effort, streamlining their processes and simplifying procedures," Rogers said. "It is time for us to capitalize on these successes. It is only through a collaborative and universitywide approach that we will deploy the most efficient processes and systems across the entire campus."

The university recently contracted with PeopleSoft, Inc., of Pleasanton, Calif., to provide an integrated suite of administrative information systems that will allow the university to simplify the way administrative work is accomplished and aid in the overall re-engineering efforts.

Rogers noted that more than half the money the university plans to invest in Project 2000 over the next five years will be generated from within the university, largely through reassignment of existing personnel who will be working on the project. Project 2000 will be sponsored by the President's Council and will have a leadership group (Project 2000 Council) comprising faculty, deans and executive staff representatives. The council will resolve policy questions, set priorities and monitor progress of the project's Steering Group and its many project teams. The Steering Group will be managed by Cathy S. Dove, director of management services, and Helen Mohrmann, director of administrative systems. "Our vision of this new environment is that everyone who interacts with Cornell on administrative matters should feel that Cornell is unified and efficient," Rogers said. "Students, parents and others should find it easier to get the information they need. Administrators should be able to plan and project for the future of their college, department or unit. Faculty and staff should be able to fulfill many of their job responsibilities and conduct much of their business electronically, thereby reducing a great deal of paperwork, duplication and repetition."

"As administrators, one of our most important objectives is to support the superb teaching and cutting-edge research of our faculty with world-class administrative performance," said Mark K. Spiro, associate dean for administration in the College of Engineering. "This means constantly searching for strategies and tools that provide our faculty and students with unqualified services at the lowest possible cost. Our objective is to do things better, faster and with less effort. To date, re-engineering initiatives in the departments, colleges and enterprises have been only partially successful because of outdated systems that could not be easily changed to meet our needs. Project 2000 changes that. While re-engineering activities throughout the institution will continue to help us eliminate waste and overhead, new automated systems will provide critically needed information and analyses to help us better manage the enterprise.

"For those of us involved in managing the institution's business, this project represents an extraordinary challenge. We will need to marshal all of our administrative skills -- team building, strategic planning, re-engineering, project management and activity-based accounting, for example -- to ensure its success," Spiro said.

"I see improved administrative systems as enabling our faculty to accomplish our instructional, research and service responsibilities more effectively," said Bruce P. Halpern, professor and chair of the Department of Psychology. "Project 2000 gives me more hope that this will be accomplished than I have had in many years."

H. David Lambert, vice president for information technologies, said purchase of the new PeopleSoft technology will support these re-engineering efforts.

"It is very exciting to see the emerging integration of technological systems and the ways we do business," he said. "We have made great strides with initiatives such as Bear Access, Just the Facts, Employee Essentials and the World Wide Web. The PeopleSoft purchase will take us even further, especially if it is seen not just as a new technology, but as a vehicle that can help us rethink the very ways work is done."

David A. Duffield, BEE '63, MBA '64, president of PeopleSoft, believes his group can work with Cornell in partnership to meet this challenge. "We are honored to be selected as the major business partner in this important strategic initiative. The combination of Cornell's leadership in management practice and PeopleSoft's innovations in technology, applications and service will serve as a definitive model of creative partnership within the higher education community," Duffield said.

For the next year or so, the most visible work of Project 2000 will be the development and implementation of the new PeopleSoft technology. The project includes replacing or developing five core information systems: student information, human resources/payroll, sponsored programs, finance and alumni/development. In some of these areas, no system now exists; in others, the system is based on inflexible technology that does not allow people to contribute information or analyze data.

These systems developments will involve many high-end users of the current systems. At the same time, re-engineering efforts and other initiatives designed to help meet the project goals will call for campuswide involvement. Over the next several months, teams will be formed and specific project plans developed and shared as the entire project takes shape.

Faculty and staff also will need help in making transitions to the new systems. New equipment and training in the new technology will be provided, and a model office, "A Center for Excellence," will be created and used for training.

Meanwhile, Cornell will maintain the current systems, gradually phasing them out while bringing the new ones on- line.

This year, the university will begin work on the analysis and conversion phases of the new human resources/payroll system, design and test the student information system and begin planning the financial, sponsored programs and alumni/development systems.

Between 1997 and 1999, all the new systems will be fully implemented and the re-engineering efforts across campus will reshape the ways the university organizes its work and defines the roles and responsibilities of its workforce. By the turn of the century, Cornell should be a "best managed" university, Rogers said.

"Project 2000 will improve our day-to-day learning, teaching and working lives at Cornell," Rawlings concluded. "Most important, it will allow us to focus our human, financial and capital resources on those core missions that are most vital to the life of this university: teaching, research and service."